Turning Archive 2007

Craig Daymon>Here is a pic of the pumpkins I turned for my nephew and niece for halloween. The balls are mahogany and the stems are hickory. Lots of axes.

I turned the balls using the shadow method of turning a cylinder.

1) leaving a ridge in the center,
2) touched the center of the ridge with my skew to set the contact point,
3) put the cylinder between centers with centers contacting the ridge,
4) turned away the shadow to get a ball,
5) put it between cup centers to finish truing it up,
6) oriented it between the cup centers with endgrain rotating toward me,
7) found the high spot indicating center line and cut a groove,
8) rotated the ball 90 degrees with endgrain orientation the same,
9) found center high spot again and cut another groove,
10) rotated approx. 45 degrees and marked intended groove line with pencil to insure groove would pass over where previous grooves crossed,
11) cut third groove and repeated step 10 to get another groove.

The stems were turned as a pair, also multi-centered out of a piece of 3/4" hickory dowel. I turned tenons to fit 1/4" holes drilled in the balls, flanges at the bases and about 3/8" away from flanges to a diameter of about 3/16". I then set the centers off of center equally, but in opposite directions and turned the middle section to get a bend. I did some filing to contour the transition points and then cut them in the middle.

The balls were also held in a simple donut chuck to turn indentations in the stem and opposite ends.